Samsung S95D
Samsung’s S95D takes OLED to places it has never been before
This new OLED set brings us the third generation of Samsung’s Quantum Dot take on OLED tech – and even though its previous generation already gave us a big improvement over the first, nothing could have truly prepared us for just how much of leap forward the S95D represents.
The S95D is a gorgeous sliver of TV. At a uniform 1cm-deep it’s one of the slimmest, most wall-hangable TVS there has ever been. A slinky monolith that has no right to be capable of delivering the powerhouse pictures of which it’s capable. The bezel around the screen is impressively slim too, ensuring your focus remains on the dazzling pictures the TV is playing rather than the tech producing them.
Despite its ultra-slim profile, the S95D carries eight good-sized midrange audio drivers splayed across its rear. The only reason the S95D can manage to be so slim is that it ships with an external One Connect box that houses all of the TV’S connections and processing. This box means that you need to run only a single, light-coloured cable into the S95D itself.
QD-OLED uses a blue organic light shone through red and green Quantum Dot layers to produce its pictures, resulting in a pure RGB colour reproduction without the additional brightness-boosting white element used by standard ‘WOLED’ screens. All OLED screens benefit from self-emissive pixels that are each capable of producing their own light and colour independently of each other, resulting in local contrast and lighting controls that not even the most high-end LCD TVS can rival.
Where the S95D most pushes QD-OLED forward is with its brightness. Watching HDR content reveals a substantial brightness benefit over 2023’s S95C, despite that model itself having pushed the brightness envelope for OLEDS. With HDR highlights, the scale of this brightness increase looks to be between 20 and 30 per cent over its predecessor, making it the brightest OLED screen to date.
Just as instantly noticeable as the S95D’S stunning extra brightness, though, is how immune the screen is to reflections from your room. Thanks to a new anti-reflection filter on the screen’s front, your common or garden reflections – light-coloured chairs and sofas, loud shirts, faces – are suppressed pretty much completely, even on very bright days, and even direct ultra-bright light sources hitting the screen – sunlight from an opposite window, say – are reduced to faint, highly contained light ‘balls’ that are only minimally distracting. The new Neo Quantum 4K AI Gen 2 processor brings the combined brainpower of a claimed 20 separate neural networks to bear on every frame of the picture. Aside from better upscaling of sub-4k content, there’s also a new Real Depth Enhancer that identifies the main subjects of an image and gently manipulates the way the subjects and background elements appear to create a more three-dimensional look. A new OLED HDR Pro system is designed to deliver more accurate colour mapping from the QD-OLED panel too.
The new processor also drives the latest version of Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound+ system, where a multi-channel speaker system is used to place sound effects in the correct place on – and just off – the S95D’S screen. This system now works with Dolby Atmos sound mixes too.
The S95D also boasts some pretty extreme gaming support, including 4K/120HZ, 144Hz frame-rate support, an HDR game mode with input lag kept to just 9.8ms, ALLM, a Game Hub, and an on-screen Game Bar showing graphics information and gaming aids.
Genuinely bright
Once upon a time, the ‘wow’ factor with OLED TVS depended on their stunning black levels and ability to put small bright highlights within that blackness without any loss of intensity. With the S95D, though, the first thing that hits you is how genuinely bright it is. Not just by OLED TV standards, but by the standards of any current mass-market TV technology.
Feeding the S95D some of the most aggressively mastered titles in our 4K Blu-ray collection, including Pan, Mad Max: Fury Road, and It Chapter One, results in pictures of extraordinary intensity, as blisteringly bright peak-white highlights and fantastically richly saturated colours share the screen with the stunningly deep blacks that OLED TVS are loved for.
The resulting sense of contrast is beyond that of any TV we have previously reviewed, and this extreme contrast and massive colour volume delivery holds together quite beautifully.
As well as breathing spectacular contrast life into pictures during dark-room viewing sessions, the S95D’S ground-breaking brightness makes it the best OLED TV yet for bright rooms. An achievement that is turned up to 11 by the extraordinary reflection-suppressing efforts of the new anti-glare filter, which makes it much easier to feel connected with the S95D’S pictures (even dark ones) in a bright room, even where you have loads of reflections littered across the screen.
There’s less clipping of subtle colour and peak light details in the brightest of bright shots than you got with the S95C, meaning the picture looks more consistently detailed and three-dimensional. The impact of the Real Depth Enhancer system is clearly evident and consistently lovely rather than forced or unnatural, too. And all this finer mapping of colour tones across a wider colour volume means the picture often looks sharper and crisper than that of its predecessor.
The S95D’S handling of very dark scenes – which are made to look if anything even more spectacular by the brightness they can sit alongside – looks stable, with no ‘floating black levels’.
“The first thing that hits you is how genuinely bright it is, not just by OLED TV standards, but by the standards of any current mass-market TV tech”
Viewing angles are pretty much infinite, as usual with modern OLED TVS. And provided you don’t stick with the rather heavy-handed default motion settings, instead choosing a Custom mode, setting judder and blur reduction to their three or four levels and turning off Noise Reduction, movement doesn’t cause the image to lose its spectacular sharpness or be impacted by the ‘soap opera effect’.
Beautifully filmic
The S95D’S upscaling system does a particularly good Ai-inspired job of spotting the difference between natural grain and mastering noise in HD sources, resulting in beautifully filmic results that look clean without feeling soft.
But, while the picture looks fabulously bright and intense with most content, that brightness still takes a hit compared with premium LCD TVS when the screen has to show an HDR image that floods the whole screen (rather than just parts of it) with brightness. The in most ways incredible anti-reflection filter can cause black levels to look a touch raised in bright rooms, too, and cause limited and faint traces of blooming around extremely stand-out bright objects. But overall we feel that the filter’s benefits far outweigh the negatives.
Samsung’s object-tracking sound system creates a soundstage that extends in width and height beyond the edges of the screen. It also places sounds into that space with quite startling accuracy, even managing to portray the path of moving noisy objects as they cross the screen. Details typically sound clean and plentiful, and dialogue is generally handled quite well, retaining clarity no matter how much racket there is to compete with. Unfortunately, though, the sound’s ‘spread’ doesn’t include a forward component, leaving it feeling rather flat and happening only in front of you, rather than something more immersive. Even at maximum volume, meanwhile, the S95D’S sound struggles to produce cinematic levels of noise, and the dynamic range is too limited and the bass too vague to give movie soundtracks much scale or weight.
Samsung’s latest QD-OLED hero isn’t just better than its already technically impressive predecessor – it’s so much better that it might just be one of those genuine ‘moments’ that alters traditional thinking about the roles different types of TV tech have in today’s AV world. The S95D is so good, in fact, and so evolved from its predecessor, that it almost feels like the birth of a new TV species.
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